For we were once strangers in a strange land

I looked at immigration differently after seeing the Israeli-born children of migrant workers living and playing in Hebrew and sharing their dreams

Today’s my birthday, and as I look back at this past year I’m grateful for this blog. It’s been a vehicle to organize and share my thoughts, and since Oct. 7 I’ve gotten feedback that it’s helped people have perspective in these tough times. If we all feel a little less alone, that’s more than enough for me.

I want to get away from the war for a day and focus on an issue that I’ve grown to care more about in recent years that is universal: immigration. I firmly believe that it is a misunderstood and underappreciated issue. I’ve come to the point where I support open immigration for people without a criminal record. I wasn’t always that way. I accepted restrictions as the norm, but over time, my mind changed. My attitude changed through my encounters with asylum seekers and migrant families in Israel, and that change was reinforced by learning about the process of migration, understanding its impact on societies and reflecting on my own family history and Jewish history.

I must admit I did have a generally favorable attitude toward immigration, being the grandchild of immigrants. I remember supporting President Reagan’s amnesty for illegal immigrants in the 1980s, but didn’t think about what the law actually said. It seemed to make sense that countries had the right to make such laws according to their national priorities. For example, Israel has the Law of Return, entitling all Jews to obtain automatic citizenship, but it’s very difficult for non-Jews to immigrate.

In 2014, I started meeting African asylum seekers and Filipina migrant workers and their children through field trips with my class on non-Jews in Israel at Ben-Gurion University. Migrants, particularly caregivers, had been coming since the 1990s to take demanding jobs Israelis didn’t want. Due to the nature of their jobs, many stayed a decade or more to care for their charges, and some wound up becoming mothers. The government punished them for having children by not renewing their visas. Some governments wanted to deport these families, but public pressure – families didn’t want to lose their beloved caregivers – led to an amnesty for over 1,500 children and their family. But after 2010, Netanyahu’s government harassed the families that didn’t get amnesty, jailing the mothers with their children, whose only crime was being born. Today, dozens of them are still fighting deportation through the court system.

Meanwhile, asylum seekers escaping genocide from Darfur, and later Eritreans fleeing oppression, had started showing up in 2006. (Quick distinction: asylum seekers are trying to obtain refugee status, but aren’t officially refugees.) Some 70,000 had arrived before Israel closed the border in 2012. While Israelis welcomed many with open arms initially, successive governments were intent on pressuring them to leave, making it hard for them to support themselves, failing to process their asylum requests and detaining most of them for up to a year at a time.

Hearing their stories in general persuaded me as to the importance of Israel providing them at least temporary shelter. I could see their eagerness to make a better life here but also their desire to return to their homelands once it’d be safe to return. The time I took my students to the Holot detention center made a particular impression. We met there a man from Darfur whose village had been burnt to the ground. He showed us his scars from being tortured by Bedouin in Sinai. Someone asked him, “Why Israel?” His response was that he knew the Bible, and had reasoned that if any people in the world knew what it meant to be a stranger in a strange land, it would be the Jews. And in reality, how was he being treated? He explained how the Supreme Court had forced the state to make Holot an “open” detention center, meaning they were “free” to go. But the state banned detainees from earning any money other than a daily stipend, which barely covered a one-way bus ticket to Be’er Sheva. Guards could punish them for any infraction by denying them their stipend. So, in practice, they barely could leave. All of this was done to pressure them to “voluntarily” leave for a third country. One of the volunteers then chimed in that she loved Israel and was proud of serving in the army, but when it came to the asylum seeker issue, she had nothing to be proud of regarding Israel’s treatment of them.

As for the migrants, I had the honor to meet several dozen in a makeshift church. The parents spoke about spending years taking care of the elderly, some of whom are Holocaust survivors. One begins to think, if a woman gives the best years of her life for our loved ones, when no one else in Israel will take the job, doesn’t she at least deserve a chance to stay here when that job is done?

But it was the kids who really got to me. All these children are Israeli-born and grow up speaking Hebrew as their first language. They play with Israelis, join Zionist youth groups like the Scouts, dream in Hebrew. But they also live in constant fear of being stopped by the police at any moment, or of their parents being deported, leaving them no choice but to go, too. One child spoke about how once he got a cellphone, he checked in on his mother every day to make sure she hadn’t been arrested. He was lucky to have been given amnesty in 2010, which changed his life. Suddenly he could dream of a future and he could look forward to going into the army with his Israeli friends. For those who haven’t receive amnesty, their protections end on their 18^th birthday, denied the right to health insurance, to work or to study in Israel legally. While their friends look ahead with hope, they have dread. Another thing that struck me was how every kid in the room wanted to serve in the army, if only Israel would let them.

One such Filipino did, and ended up giving his life for his country. Cydrick Garin was one of the 21 soldiers killed on Monday when an RPG hit a building, which collapsed on top of him and his comrades. Hundreds of people from across the spectrum of Israeli society attended his funeral. His death reminded me of the death of Aharon Ben Yisrael-Ellis, the first child born in Israel to the Hebrew Israelite community, a group of African Americans who spent decades fighting for their right to live in the country, who was killed in a terror attack in 2002. His father later recalled how his death opened Israelis’ hearts, leading to the government agreeing to give the community permanent residence in exchange for the children going to the army.

These encounters opened my own heart. I stopped seeing migrants as “the Other” and started seeing them as “One of us”. I enjoy watching kids of all colors walking the streets of Tel Aviv in their little Scouts uniforms chatting and joking in Hebrew. I know their parents might be going through a difficult transition, and are working hard so that their kids will have a better life. I know also that the less stress the children have about their own future, the more they’ll have an opportunity to make a positive contribution to society.

I do still get why people are resistant to immigration. The narrative about immigrants is imbued with caution and suspicion. But today is my birthday, and my wish is for people like me who have the privilege to be born in a wealthy society to also see more the “us” in immigrants than the “other” in them.

P.S. Next week, I intend to take a more historical and philosophical look at immigration and immigration policy.

On the cover: Asylum seekers and an Israeli volunteer speaking to my class at Holot in 2017. Photo: Steven Klein